Image search engines, photograph-sharing websites and desktop photograph management tools have made it easy for computer users to access and collect large numbers of images. However, image collections are usually unorganized, which makes finding desired photographs or obtaining a quick overview of an image collection very difficult. Thumbnails, tapestries, collages and feature-based processing have been attempted to help users find desired images within a collection.
Many image collections are accompanied by rich text information, and such image collections are referred to herein as tagged image collections. For example, images may be titled, tagged, and/or annotated by users. Images from web pages are often associated with accompanying text, which may be used for image indices in most existing image search engines. The text information usually reflects the semantic content of images, whereby users may obtain a semantic overview of a collection, but often contains significant “noise” that leads to undesirable results.
Any improvements in technology with respect to visual-based and textual-based techniques that help users deal with large images collections are thus desirable.